From Debord’s letter to Morgan Sportes, 13 January 1989 http://www.notbored.org/debord-13January1989.html (Correspondance, tome 7, Fayard)

I find you a little hard on [George] Orwell. It seems to me that he had to write this book[2] quickly ; the pure opposite of "testimony," according to Sartre, for example : that is to say, worn-out lies redeemed by the ton, at the cost of one’s friends, and dogmatically regurgitated with a very [self] satisfied pride.

Without wanting to appear to you as favoring a resurrection of the [Aristotelian] rule of the three unities, Orwell appears to me to have been right to limit his text to a single subject, already vast and so surprising to his readers, who had been violently conditioned in the opposite direction ; a subject about which he himself was ignorant six months previously. Orwell knew how to see and say the truth ; and he knew to make it believed (at least by those who wanted to read it). I find an encouraging example in him : his style [son art] of writing allowed him to see. And if his book is an instance of reporting, one must agree that there had never been an assignment so difficult. The honest and daring reports of Albert Londres are very conventional when it comes to the values that he shared with the majority of his readers ; the reports of John Reed are mistaken concerning 1917 and he was far from having understood everything in his more sympathetic remarks about the Mexican Revolution.

You say about Orwell : "What could he do in this hell ?" Sure enough, given the result. . . . But he was drawn by Spain in revolution. It is in this that he informed us, indirectly, about himself.